“Mum . . . ,” I say again, and in the way she breathes, I know she knows what I am going to say. I press my forehead again into the wall. When I speak, it comes in a rush.
“I want to go back.”
I catch my breath, expecting I don’t know what. I think she will be angry, sad, or disappointed. But when she speaks, all I hear is relief.
“Then go back,” she says firmly, and through the phone, I hear her nodding.
My hands are shaking when I replace the receiver. It takes me all of a day to be ready to leave. The next morning, I’m on my way to the bus station. And for some reason, I cannot stop smiling.
It takes more than sixty hours and eight different buses, and it feels like it takes a year. But then, in no time at all, I am dropping stiffly onto the tarmac. Shimmering heat waves make strange, blurry shapes along the road. Jungle meets above my head, thicker than I remember, knotting to block out the sky. I just stare for a moment. The muddy twisting track by the fumador has been widened, pressed down by footsteps. Coco’s sign is gone. A bright, beautifully painted banner now sits in its place, scrawled with the words BIENVENIDOS EL PARQUE. I think for a second that among the distorted shimmers, I see Coco feeling the breeze on his face. I shake my head, pulling myself in check. The jungle twists across the road and I can’t remember it being so green. Was it this green before? The sun shines white through the fanned, fluted leaves, reflecting emerald, olive, sage, lime, moss, jade, turquoise, viridian . . . colours I cannot name, across my face, across the silvery-gold branches of the trees. For a moment it is so beautiful, I cannot move. Too terrified to blink because if I do, maybe I’ll wake up and I won’t be here at all. I’ll have made a different choice. I’ll be in England behind a desk, nervous that my hair is out of place.
“Laurita!”
I spin. A smile spreads across my face. Suddenly, ridiculously, there’s Mila. I drink her in. Her luscious dark hair caught in a plait. Her old, battered cowboy hat. Her shoulders, are they more stooped than before? I can’t tell. I’m just so relieved to see her. I drop my backpack and take a step, thinking she is going to hug me.
“Laura.” She doesn’t hug me. She barrels into me, gripping my arms around the tops so hard it hurts. I stare into her brown eyes, gold settling in a pond.
“Wayra’s gone.” Her fingers tighten, but I don’t feel it.
My heart has stopped beating.
“What?” I whisper.
Her eyes start to well and one tear slides down one cheek, which I see now is bloated with tiredness. The light catches her, splayed as if through a prism. The jungle, shimmering in waves, seems to whisper and then it puckers in the heat. The lines all over her face, which I swear weren’t there last year, crease and, as I stand there watching, crack beneath my fingers.
Mila is speaking but I don’t know what she’s saying.
I shake my head. “Qué . . . ,” I murmur.
“She ran away, Laurita.”
I sway. A slight mist is easing off the tarmac. There is air, I think, in my throat, but I can’t seem to swallow. An animal whines. Above us, a macaw screams. Mila does hug me then and I stand immobile in her arms. She smells of musty sweat and the road smells of burnt rubber. I can taste the salt from her skin on my lips. She’s gone. Wayra’s gone. This is all I can think. The forest repeats the alarm. Wayra is gone. Gone. Gone. Somewhere far away, someone whines again.
I visited the zoo yesterday. In my breaks between buses, in the closest major city, eight hours from the parque. I needed to stretch my legs but also, I just needed to see it. Some of our animals, I knew, came from this zoo. It was a sprawling place in the middle of the city with concrete paths, hot, glaring sunshine, popcorn carts and cages packed in tight. It was flooded with families, school groups, tourists, couples holding hands. The laughter of kids and the vivid snap of camera lenses. Everyone seemed to be having a great time.
When I reached the felines, I found a line of semi-subterranean enclosures, little more than boxes really, side by side like glass-fronted packing crates, each about four metres across, that you look down on, hanging over metal railings. People crowded in, reminding me of gulls at a feast. A lynx. She was pressed up against the wall, shaking. Next to her a male puma on concrete, his muscles clenching horribly each time someone took a photo. You could tell that he should have been huge. But his body was shrunken, his tail obviously broken a long time ago, his fur matted in tufts. There was an ocelot, curled up on a single leafless branch, nothing in her eyes at all. Jaguars, most of them immobile, hunched in corners as if they hadn’t moved in years. The people, however, a mixture of travellers and locals, were moving. Pointing, laughing, crowding, pushing, ooh-ing, aah-ing.
At the end of the line, a slight female puma was pacing, deathly quiet. I stayed for a long time, the railings pressed hard against my freezing-cold belly. There was something about the way her fur faded from silver to grey, the angular shape of her cheekbones. The way she was sliding, a ghost on tiptoes. It took her about three steps before she had to turn and start again. Turn and start again. Turn and start again. I don’t know how long she’d been doing that for. Turn and start again. Years perhaps.
I didn’t know what to do. Chain myself to the fence, campaign against the zoo, call the local and national news? That’s what Juan Carlos would have done, I’d heard, the Bolivian volunteer who helped get the parque off the ground. He goes around the country now, chaining himself to fences, shutting himself in cages in town squares, carrying broken-legged pumas out of circuses in his arms. Before I walked away, because the zoo was closing, I didn’t do any of the things I thought about. But I did make a prayer, my knuckles so tight they turned white. I prayed that someday, if that puma could never have the life she should have, if she could never be free, then I prayed that one day that puma would end up at the parque.
I don’t want to talk to anyone. I avoid the crowds of laughing volunteers. Faustino is on top of the comedor glaring at them all. I’m desperate to say hi to him but I don’t want to do it in front of these people I don’t know. I look around for Panchi but I can’t see her. I see Mariela and Juana though, doing each other’s hair like no time has passed at all, and we wave to each other shyly. They are trying to push a larger, significantly fatter Teanji out of the way, and when he beeps indignantly, I manage a weak smile. But the knot in my chest grows. A black-furred, small-headed, gangly monkey that I don’t recognise, a spider monkey, lanky and long-limbed, streaks by. People squeal, pointing. There are so many people. Were there always this many? There must be close to fifty or sixty. Tents are haphazardly erected along the paths. The colours are strange, reds, blues, oranges. There can’t be enough beds for everyone. What if there isn’t a bed for me? I start to panic. The bowed edge of the pìos’ enclosure comes into focus. Petunia and the rest are nowhere to be seen. It won’t be long before night comes. The aviary is silent too. I’m about to turn away when suddenly I hear a squawk. I swing my head, craning my neck.
“Lolo!” I exclaim.
The bright macaw, from wherever he’s been hiding—how he’s even outside the aviary, I don’t know, but right now I don’t care—swoops, dive-bombing my head. He lands so gracelessly that I laugh out loud, soothing the pain inside, just beside my heart. I collapse onto the dirt. He spreads his wing feathers, ornately pleated and perfect, and waddles into my lap. Then he flops, as he’s done so many hundreds of times before. I reach for him, my hands shaking, to scratch the tickly feathers under his belly. He remembers me! He really does. He waggles his spindly legs. The way he flew—he doesn’t need someone with a stick anymore! I laugh again as he flips back over, spreads his wings, takes off and cruises upwards, showing me what he can do. The sky is starting to turn red, the jagged peaks of the canopy black. He’s a blue streak, the forest a wilderness that he navigates seamlessly, a sailor in a storm.
“Frodo.”
I spin as Lorenzo lets out an exuberant shriek.
Sammie stands at the edge of the path
, just in the shadow of the animal kitchen, grinning. “You let your hair grow.”
My hand self-consciously flies to my straggly ponytail. A leaf falls out and I hold it carefully in the palm of my hand. She smiles, rocking back on her heels. She’s gained some weight, dyed her hair a darker shade of blond. But she’s still wearing the same dirty red flannel shirt that she had on when we said goodbye to each other last year. I feel a little strange, shy.
“When did you get back?” I ask. I heard she’d left, not too long after Christmas.
“About a month ago.” She eyes me carefully. “Have you seen anyone else yet?”
“Mila.” I try not to let my voice crack. “She told me about Wayra.”
She nods, biting her lip. Then she reaches out a sweaty hand and I take it, letting her pull me up off the ground. We don’t hug. We just stand there awkwardly together, waiting for each other to say something.
“Who else is here?” I finally ask.
“Harry got back yesterday,” she says.
I nod. I knew that, had been informed by Facebook, and am trying to be cool about it. The reality is, Harry feels like a lifetime ago.
“Tom’s been here a few weeks,” she continues quickly. “The rest of the volunteers are new. And there’s hordes of them! Fifty or something ridiculous like that.” She laughs. Lorenzo hears it. He lands on her head and sticks his beak tenderly in her ear. She reaches up a finger to stroke him. The light is dying rapidly, turning us all into little more than dusky shapes. She takes a step towards the aviary and struggles to open the door. The latch to the macaws’ cage was broken when I left. I reach out to help her. It’s still broken of course. I shake my head with a despairing laugh, waving a number of mosquitoes out of my face.
“He’s semi-free now,” she says quietly. “Did you know that?”
“Free?” I stare at Lorenzo, his claws wrapped possessively in her nest of wild hair. “How can he—”
“Just during the day.” She smiles proudly. “He can fly by himself and find his own food.”
He puffs up his wings. He knows she’s talking about him. Free. Not entirely wild. But not lost either. As we enter the cage, the last of the dusk seems to refract off the fencing squares, sending a criss-cross pattern of shadows across the dirt. The rest of the macaws are quiet, asleep in their night houses already, built in a higgledy-piggledy array around the walls. All I can hear is the occasional soft rustle of a feather, the stroke of a beak against a wing, night dropping outside, like a blanket falling over the world. Sammie turns to me then, her face white. A frosty cold shoots into my chest.
“What?” I whisper, bracing myself.
She gulps, her eyes flicking away before she clenches her jaw, Lorenzo pressed up against her pale cheek. Someone else has died, is all I can think, the panic coming back in a rush. Wayra. They’ve found her . . .
The trees are just darkness now.
“Panchi.” Sammie’s voice breaks. “Last week . . .”
I just stare at her. Her eyes fill up with tears and she angrily wipes them away, nudging Lorenzo gently into his own little house in his quiet corner of the aviary and pulling the curtains shut.
“She died. She got hit—”
“A truck?” I exclaim. “Another fucking truck?”
She nods grimly. “Logging truck. There are so many of them now. So many more than last year.” She pauses, swallowing. “She died instantly.” She reaches over and takes my hand, a gesture so unusual that it makes me jump. I think Sammie and I were friends, last time. But we were never close. Not like I was with Jane, or Paddy. “We buried her next to Coco.”
The feeling of her hand in mine is too strange and I pull away, my palm clammy with sweat. And I think if I speak, something inside me will explode. My insides will hang from the branches of these spiky huicungo palms, like the giant seed pods that fall slowly to earth for the birds to pick off one by one. So I don’t speak. I just hobble with Sammie out of the aviary, my body seized up and miserable after the endless buses. I close the door behind me. I think I can see what might be the first star, pale in a flat sky. I stare up at it, blinking back tears, listening to the high-pitched whine of mosquitoes and the drone of amphibians in the murky wet grasses. The canopy is black, ragged lines of shadow. Only the last hints of red still cling on. The savage coal-dark needles that coat the trees and the ground bleed together. The air is suddenly as heavy as I feel.
I remember how I felt when I first came here. I couldn’t sleep. The jungle was so loud, full of raging sharp heartbeats. Now the heartbeats I most want to hear, the ones I’ve dreamt about for months, they’re not here. I’ll never hear them again.
I stare through the drapes of the mosquito netting. Sammie has let me share her bed. A bottom bunk in Santa Cruz. The person in my old bed now—I don’t know them. The room is full and stuffy. Sammie has been kind, otherwise I’d be in a borrowed tent. There are ten bodies in here, including my own, squashed into the six tiny beds, Tom and Harry amongst them.
Sammie has pushed herself up against the wall as far as she can go and I am huddled on an inch of mattress, almost falling out of the gauzy net. Faustino is between us in paroxysms of miserable delight, occasionally and surreptitiously licking sweat off the side of my neck. His small hand is pressed against my heart. I touch his frizzy, damp fur. He’s asleep now, his lips pursed, his breath making his whiskers tremble. It’s strange, knowing that of these ten bodies, none of them is Coco. I cannot imagine how Faustino feels. Lonely, I would think. Sad. Confused. Gently, I press his hand a little closer and feel his fingers curling into mine.
Wayra’s collar broke. Yesterday. Sammie, Harry and Tom told me in snatches as we lay on the road together, ignoring the strange looks from the other volunteers. She scaled a tree and came down through a vine, catching herself and snapping her collar. After she fell, she just ran. But she never learnt how to navigate, not like Lorenzo. She couldn’t watch other pumas and learn how to do it. When she needed her mum, her mum was taken. All she had was us, and we could never show her. Never teach her how to hunt. To protect herself. To not need humans for food, or love. Animals like her are not released for a reason. She has no good options, out there. She could starve. She could be killed by another cat fighting for territory. She could be hit by a car. She could be recaptured and sent to that awful zoo in the city or chained up as a pet. She could be shot.
I place my hand over the silky thin skin across Faustino’s ribs and watch as he breathes, very softly, in and out. I just want them all to be safe. Rats scurry along the walls. Mosquitoes whine outside. An owl hoots shrilly, telling other owls where he is. I look back at Foz and a wall of tears convenes in the back of my throat. I rub my nose hard and an unsanctioned choking noise escapes. My breath catches and suddenly I can’t breathe at all. I grit my teeth, holding my hand over my mouth. I feel Sammie shift quietly, the hay mattress undulating underneath. I dig my fingernails into my palms but it does no good. Everyone can hear. The people trying to sleep, the rats, the wasps in their old nest outside the door. The spiders running over the walls. The palm trees, the owl up on his perch, Teanji in his little house above the roof. The wild monkeys sleeping in the canopy, the night-time creatures going hunting. Tears are running down my cheeks now, unstoppable.
I hear Sammie roll over onto her back. Faustino does the same. They do not say anything or make any move to touch me. Sammie is one of the last people I’d choose to hear me cry. I’m self-conscious around her. She’s too funny, too loud. But she stays quiet now, the only sound the rush of my tears. It takes a long time for my choking to ease but finally, when I am just starting to breathe normally again, Faustino crawls into the pit between my shoulder and neck and touches his hand to my wet cheek. He puts his arm around my neck and squeezes. Then I am crying again. Not like before. This time it’s just tears, slow and hot, squeezing out of the sides of my eyes and onto his fur.
Sammie turns her head. I see the silhouette of her nose and the dark nest of her l
ong hair by the faint blue light of the moon shining through the netted window.
“It’s just so strange,” she whispers. “Without them.”
A tree, right behind the wall, touches the roof. It makes a soft scratching. I imagine the moon gleaming off it like melted silver. The beams bright in the darkness. I nod rapidly, trying to laugh, but it comes as a mangled sort of croak. Finally I manage to choke out, “Who’s going to steal our underwear now?”
She laughs. “You might want to check up in the rafters. I reckon Fozzy’s still got a good collection of bras. I’m missing at least four.”
I laugh, wiping my nose with the back of my hand. We both stare into the darkness. I think she goes to sleep, but then I hear very quietly:
“I was in the States working four jobs just to get back here. I was on antidepressants. I was more miserable than miserable.”
I turn slowly, swallowing my surprise. Very gently, she touches the side of my arm.
“The very worst day here is still better than any day back home.”
I gulp. Faustino resettles, melting into the gap between us, his tail wrapped around her neck, one of his arms slung across my legs. I stare at the pretty shape of her cheek, the billows of her hair, and I feel a swell of gratitude. I relax sleepily against the pillow.
“Do you think he misses Coco?”
Sammie sighs and shifts again, the bed creaking. “Yes.”
After a while, I ease his hand again into mine. At first there’s nothing, then I feel the slight pressure as his thin, hairy fingers tighten around me.
The next morning, I sit on the bench with Mila. Faustino is by himself on the roof, howling to the sunrise. The sky behind the dorms is a pale pinkish rose, the trees stained bronze. Without Coco, it just sounds desperately lonely. Mila’s face looks almost soft, the dawn light tinting the slightly crooked curve of her nose, her long hair unbound, hanging gleaming around her jeans. But there is a tight frown around her mouth and the lines across her forehead are etched deep. She looks exhausted. Her eyes settle on Morocha, the spider monkey, who is spread-eagled across the patio, picking up ants off the floor and flicking them at unsuspecting volunteers. Mila sinks back against the wall, her cowboy hat gripped tightly in her lap, her face falling into shadow. She lets out a resigned sigh.
The Puma Years: A Memoir Page 15
